Sunshine Week: Secrecy over the public interest

9:07 AM,
Mar. 9, 2013

Written by

GENEVA OVERHOLSER
Guest Essayist

Our impoverished national conversation on guns appears to have a new casualty: public information.

The latest victim is the Bangor Daily News in Bangor, Me., whose request for the names of concealed gun permit holders - a public record in Maine - unleashed a firestorm. The paper withdrew its request. The reason this sounds familiar, of course, is because of the controversy last December, when a White Plains, N.Y., newspaper (the Journal News) published the names and addresses of handgun permit holders. That newspaper, too, ended up succumbing to the outrage directed against it.